Lise Meitner 1878 - 1968
There was a lady physicist who lived in the late 1800s to mid 1900s. She was tutored at home for most of her upbringing in Austria. She knew she was smart and wanted to get a good education. But she struggled to be admitted to an institution of higher learning, because in those days it just wasn't done. She prevailed, was accepted to the University and finished her studies. She was one woman among 100 men in her classes and was met with attitudes anywhere from begrudging acceptance to open hostility.

Lise Meitner received her doctorate in physics at the age of 28 from the University of Vienna. She got her first job in Berlin at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. In those years, there was a lot of interest by chemists and physicists in understanding the inner workings of the atom. Meitner worked long hours in a converted carpentry studio in the basement because the laboratory supervisor could not bear to see a woman work in the all-male laboratory. Because she was a woman, she wasn't paid anything, and she lived on an allowance provided by her parents.

Ten years of persistent, tedious work later, in 1917, she and chemist Ottto Hahn discovered the first long-lived isotope of the element protactinium. The same year, she was given her own physics section of the laboratory and finally started to receive a salary.

In 1923, her experiments led her to the discovery of the cause of the emission from surfaces of electrons with signature energies. Two years later, a scientist in France, Pierre Victor Auger, made the same discovery independently. The effect became known as the Auger Effect. Why not the Meitner Effect?

In 1933 she was promoted to acting director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry. She was 55 years old. In the same year Adolf Hitler came into power. Many eminent Jewish scientists in Germany were forced to resign their posts or were dismissed. Her Austrian passport protected her somewhat from the whims of the Fuehrer. She continued to work in Berlin under degrading conditions that became more and more dangerous.

In 1938, her situation became desperate and she was forced to flee the country for her life. A Jewish woman with her passport revoked, she was in imminent danger. With help from friends, she escaped the country with only a few German marks in her pocket and a diamond ring to bribe the border officials. All her possessions, including her research papers and laboratory equipment, painstaking built over many years of work, had to be left behind. A promised appointment at Gronigen University did not come through and she went instead to Stockholm, where she took a post at Manne Seigbahn's laboratory.

Hahn and Meitner continued to collaborate long-distance on physics and chemistry experiments to understand the workings of the atom. Hahn was working in Berlin with Meitner's equipment. Meitner was working in Stockholm without her research notes or apparatus, trying to interpret the results of Hahn's experiments. She regularly met with Otto Frisch, her nephew, another exiled Jewish scientist from Germany. Although Otto Hahn performed the experiments which demonstrated the power of nuclear fission, Meitner had built the experimental apparatus and designed many of the experiments. Meitner and Frisch wrote the paper explaining the results which had been measured by Meitner's former colleague, Hahn.

Meitner recognized the possibility of nuclear fission starting a chain reaction with enormous energy release. But she wanted no part in the production of a nuclear bomb. Other members of the scientific community went on to work on the Manhattan Project in the United States, building the first nuclear bomb.

In 1944, Otto Hahn received the Nobel prize for the discovery of nuclear fission. He did not acknowledge the contribution of Lise Meitner, who had designed the experiments, built the apparatus and explained the results. Meitner received a number of other prizes over the years for her accomplishments, including the Enrico Fermi award together with Hahn and Frisch in 1966.

Element 109 meitnerium, was named in her honor.

Credits:

1. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner
2. http://www.users.bigpond.com/Sinclair/fission/LiseMeitner.html
3. Ruth Lewis Sime, A Life in Physics

For more about this amazing scientist, read Ruth Lewis Sime's excellent book available on Amazon.

Emilie du Chatelet was a scientific scholar way ahead of her time, a female physicist and mathematician living and practicing science in the 1700s.

She was well educated for the time, and by the age of twelve she was fluent in Latin, Italian, Greek and German, as well as her native French. She was later to publish translations into French of Greek and Latin plays and philosophy. She also liked to dance, played the harpsichord, sang opera, and was an amateur actress.

She had an arranged marriage with a French military officer and bore three children with him. At some time she considered her marriage obligations complete and pursued love affairs with other partners.

Du Chatelet was an ambitious and inquisitive person with a great thirst for knowledge and scientific discussion. Because she was not allowed to attend the schools of higher learning, she hired tutors to teach her about mathematics and physics. She sought out opportunities to experiment and discuss scientific theories.

One of her partners was Voltaire, a prolific playwrite and controversial philosopher, who on more than one occasion got himself in trouble with the authorities for his writings. Any works published in France at the time, had to have the royal approval. One of Voltaire's controversial works found its way into print without the required approval. The publisher was imprisoned and a warrant issued for Voltaire's arrest.

Voltaire was wealthy and popular with the noble class although he was not one of them. With the influence of his friends and protectors, Voltaire's arrest warrant was allowed to be satisfied by house arrest. He took up residence in a run-down country manor owned by Du Chatalet's husband. Voltaire paid for refurbishing of the estate with the full approval and protection of the husband.

It was a difficult time for Du Chatelet in Paris; her youngest son became gravely ill and died, and two of her tutors moved away from Paris to study with their mentor. Du Chatalet decided to leave her life in Paris and join Voltaire at the country estate.

Over the span of fifteen years, Du Chatalet and Voltaire worked together on many experiments to try to understand the nature of fire and light. They studied the works of other scientists and collaborated on many writings, but their understanding of science began to diverge.

Du Chatelet created her own Academie of Sciences in her country manor. Learned men were invited to come and visit, be entertained and discuss physics and nature. She corresponded with many learned men of the times. She studied and developed many theories of her own. Many of her works were published anonymously since women were not taken seriously as people with intellects.

One of her best known works is a translation of Isaac Newton's Principia.

Julia Morgan graduated from UC Berkeley in 1894 with a degree in civil engineering. She wanted to study architecture and design and decided to go to Europe for advanced study.

She struggled to be admitted to the prestigious Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris, because they discouraged foreigners from applying and did not at the time admit women.

After three tries at the admission exam, she placed 13 out of 376 and was given a place. She was the first woman ever to graduate with a degree in architecture from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

After graduating, she returned to her native California and set up a practice in San Francisco. She designed an incredible number of famous buildings in California, many of which now have landmark status. She built more of her designs than Frank Lloyd Wright, who is considered by the American Institute of Architects to be the greatest American architect of all time.

Some of her best known works are:

Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California
Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey, California
St. John's Presbyterian Church
Phoebe Apperson Hearst Women's Gymnasium
The Berkeley Women's City Club

She also worked with John Galen Howard on a number of buildings on the UC Berkeley campus including Hearst Mining Building and The Greek Theater.

For more information, visit this excellent site: www.juliamorgan.org

Rosalind Franklin showed a strong aptitude for the sciences at an early age in her studies in London. In 1941 she earned a bachelors degree in natural sciences with a specialty in physical chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge. She went on to work on graduate research with the British Coal Utilization Research Association and earned a PhD in 1945.

Over the next five years at a laboratory in Paris, she became proficient at using x-ray diffraction techniques to identify crystalline structures of matter such as coal. Over the span of her 13 year career, she published more than a dozen papers on various forms of carbon and became a known authority on the structure of coal.

She moved to King's College in 1951 and began her work on DNA. In her experiments at Kings, she identified two distinct forms of DNA, an A form and a B form. Her findings were published in internal reports at King's College in 1951, and in Nature magazine in 1953. Previous researchers had had to work with confusing images due to mixtures of the A and B forms.

Franklin's most famous work was a clear x-ray photograph of the structure of the B form of DNA. She found that the best images of the different forms could be obtained from carefully hydrated specimens of DNA at the optimum humidity. She carefully dehydrated and rehydrated the specimens to get the most clear image of the DNA.

She designed a special camera to focus the image and developed a technique for improving the orientation of the DNA fibers in the camera's beam. Then she took x-ray diffraction photographs.

Using her careful experimental techniques, Franklin was able to determine the density of DNA, the unit cell size and water content. She proposed a double helix structure and gave precise measurements of the diameter, the separation between the fibers and the pitch of the helix. Her photograph showed the structure and dimensions in great detail.

Due to conflicts between Franklin and another DNA researcher at King's College, Dr. Maurice Wilkins, Franklin transferred her fellowship to Birkbeck College. Unfortunately she was forced to agree not to perform any additional experiments on DNA, to leave the x-ray diffraction photograph behind and to leave the rest of the work to Wilkins to finish.

She went on to do important work on viruses at Birkbeck College, publishing 14 papers and completing research for 3 more that were published after her death.

Crick and Watson built their first incorrect model of DNA in 1951. After Wilkins showed Franklin's photograph to Watkins in 1952, and Crick's thesis advisor, Max Perutz showed Crick the report from King's College, they began to build their correct model of DNA.

Franklin developed serious health problems and died of cancer in 1958, at the age of 37.

Wilkins, Crick and Watson went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1962 for the discoveries of the structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin's name was not mentioned in the awards ceremony.

Watson's 1958 book "The Double Helix" portrays Franklin as a difficult woman who did not understand her data. It also falsely depicts her as Wilkin's assistant instead of a primary researcher in her own right. Her friends and colleagues disputed the inaccuracies in the book.

Later biographies have been written to set the record straight.

Credits:

www.physicstoday.org
article by Lynne Elkins, Mar 2003

Anne Sayer, Rosalind Franklin and DNA, W. W. Norton, 1975